Our Elites and Their Body Counts
Wars, like sporting events, have opposing teams, rabid fans, and degenerate elites who profit obscenely from the action. Mercenaries and war profiteers smell just like the money-grubbing bookmakers and morally bankrupt gamblers who debase sports. But unlike sporting events, wars don’t have scoreboards. At least, they didn’t until the 1960s.
The United States military engineered its very own Jumbotron during the Vietnam War. Instead of points scored, U.S. officials tallied up their war machine’s body count so the folks back home could see who was winning as the carnage unfolded. The federal government drafted armies of young men to supply the warm bodies. And defense contractors drafted armies of accountants to tally up the blood-soaked profits.
General William Westmoreland’s futile “strategy of attrition,” intended to force North Vietnam’s submission by outpacing them in enemy deaths, lent itself to the most morbid scorekeeping. Philip Caputo, a Vietnam Marine lieutenant and later a disgruntled wartime correspondent, explained in his 1977 memoir, A Rumor of War, how America’s misguided mission in Southeast Asia deviated from previous military plans. The U.S. didn’t look to capture land or take strategic strongholds in keeping with the time-tested counsel of Clausewitz or Sun Tzu. In their place, America aimed “simply to kill: to kill communists and as many of them as possible. Stack ‘em like cordwood.” Victory would be measured in a high body count. Just like the scoreboard at the Super Bowl, success in war boiled down to “a matter of arithmetic.”
According to Caputo, when human lives become points on a scoreboard, soldiers and their commanders develop “a contempt for human life.” Even worst, they indulge in a “predilection for taking it.” Saner minds cry foul with the luxury of hindsight. In his 1992 book It Doesn’t Take a Hero, General Norman Schwarzkopf recalled a “scathing” 1970 Army War College report that cited an incensed U.S. army captain who nearly came to blows with his South Vietnamese counterpart over who “would take credit for various enemy body parts.” In Lewis Sorley’s 1990 book A Better War, based on General Creighton Abrams’ personal papers, the author described the United States’ technocratic obsession with body counts as “the most corrupt—and corrupting—measure of progress in the whole mess” that was America’s two-decade debacle in Vietnam. Unfortunately, these voices of reason muted themselves during the war.
Nothing exposed the Vietnam War’s absurdity better than the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, however. Formally known as the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, the Papers detailed the United States’ involvement in Vietnam between 1945 and 1968. Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked as an analyst on the compilation, later leaked it to The New York Times.
The Papers showed how the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations all lied, both to the media and the public, about their intentions in Southeast Asia. American officials started by undermining the Geneva Accords in the 1950s. A decade later, in his nationally televised “Midnight Address” on Aug. 4, 1964, LBJ lied to the American people when he promised, “We still seek no wider war” after the second false flag in the Gulf of Tonkin. American involvement in Vietnam rested on a foundation of falsehoods. The war’s paper trail showed a callous disdain for the United States’ global reputation, the American taxpayer, and, far more importantly, its duty-bound servicemen’s lives that has never been surpassed.
Until the Epstein files dropped. Replace Robert McNamara with Ghislaine Maxwell. Let Epstein himself stand in for Johnson. And the release of the files looks just like The New York Times’ publication of the Papers. We’ve teleported back to 1968, “The Year the Dream Died.”
Back then, we pretended to enjoy Jimi Hendrix and The Doors on our tinny-sounding AM radios. Today, our AirPods stereophonically blast Taylor Swift and Cardi B into our empty heads. Politically astute Americans marched in protest against the Vietnam War, their anger later justified by the Papers’ voluminous condemnations. As a result, LBJ refused to run, Nixon resigned, and the draft ended.
Today, MS NOW only sees Trump in the Epstein files, while FOX News cares more about Savannah Guthrie’s mother than what the FBI alleges are more than 1,000 Epstein victims. Yesterday’s antiwar marchers now amuse themselves by pumping out distasteful AI videos of Hitler pummeling Epstein in an MMA fight. Dogmatic hyper partisanship and boorish humor have opened a bread-and-circuses escape hatch for Epstein’s cronies.
The Epstein files work like a Rorschach test for those digging into them. Regardless of one’s political leanings, there’s an email, photograph, or text message to sate the viewer’s curiosity or confirm his prior beliefs, no matter how sordid they might be. Journalists and researchers will spend years connecting the dots of perversion and international intrigue buried in the files. But until they publish their conclusions, we must never stop reminding ourselves how much Epstein and his gang of apparently perverted globalists and plutocrats hated the average American, especially the underage girls they allegedly sexually abused.
Attorney Kathryn Ruemmler, Epstein’s modern-day Rasputin, stepped out of central casting to personify the condescension of all his bootlickers. Before wallowing in the mud with Epstein, Ruemmler earned her liberal participation trophy as principal associate deputy attorney general in President Obama’s Justice Department. Before riding the Obama gravy train, she worked as associate counsel to President Clinton, arguably the best presidential administration to train under for an attorney looking to expand her practice into the convicted sex offender market. Ruemmler and Epstein traded emails between 2014 and 2019.
Keep in mind these communications with Epstein occurred long after his 2008 convictions for felonious sex crimes, but before his 2019 arrest for sex trafficking and conspiracy to traffic minors for sex. Like beekeepers, Ruemmler and her now-former employer, Goldman Sachs, furiously pumped smoke into the hive containing the Epstein files, in an attempt to render any curious researcher as harmless as a suffocating honeybee. However, the Epstein files have unleashed swarms, and smoke doesn’t work against swarms.
Ruemmler supposedly advised Epstein on legal and estate matters, according to her subsequent hollow disclaimers. She apparently also worked with the CIA, and bragged to Epstein in 2015 that “John Brennan gave me the CIA Agency Medal (the CIA’s highest award) this morning. How cool is that?” However, she went full mask-off in a 2018 email that The Wall Street Journal uncovered on Jan. 20. The Kathryn Ruemmlers who inhabit Epstein World don’t drive from Washington to New York. They luxuriate on Amtrak’s Acela, where they can scream into their cell phones and treat the conductors like, well, Epstein’s underage sex slaves. So imagine Ruemmler’s horror when she had to drive—in a car!—from D.C. to New York to meet with Epstein.
Better yet, let Ruemmler’s email to Epstein create the image for you. According to the Journal, Ruemmler gagged that she would see people “who are at least 100 pounds overweight” at the rest stops along the way. Sedentary truck drivers, unlike Ruemmler, not blessed with Georgetown Law degrees, pack on the pounds as they struggle to support their families, subsisting on high-calorie rest-stop slop. Ruemmler won’t ever bump into them at Goldman’s employee gym. Teenage girls didn’t get shanghaied into Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse or Palm Beach mansion if they were 15, let alone 100, pounds overweight.
Goldman CEO David Solomon defended Ruemmler, just as the swarm attacked. “Kathy is an excellent general counsel and we benefit from her advice every day,” Solomon said, before adding, “and is widely respected and admired at the firm.” Nevertheless, the disclosure of Ruemmler’s relationship with Epstein resulted in her resignation on Feb. 12.
Ruemmler probably wouldn’t garner that same level of admiration at the rest stops along I-95 between Washington and New York. Lucky for her, the overweight truckers who stopped there had no idea how much contempt the fish-out-of-water blonde woman dashing in and out of the restroom had for them. And they had even less idea that Ruemmler’s Hermès bag, a gift from Epstein along with $10,000 in Bergdorf Goodman gift cards, cost more than they earn in three months of nonstop hauling. Ruemmler bragged she was “totally tricked out by Uncle Jeffrey,” just to rub it in. On top of his monetary gifts, Epstein reassured Ruemmler she had “done nothing wrong” after she admitted to an affair with one of his married colleagues. Infidelity provokes no shame in the perverse world of convicted sex offenders.
In my humble opinion, the Epstein files’ most shocking revelation wasn’t the implied sexual abuse of underage girls. I would have bet my entire net worth that the beta males and soycialists named in the files would have molested little boys instead. It’s hard to imagine Bill Gates in a fistfight, or Noam Chomsky coaching football. I doubt Reid Hoffman ever lifted weights (jazzercise, maybe). Anyway, there are millions more pages left to analyze. So maybe I can still place that bet on Polymarket. In the meantime, I remain shocked like everyone else, but for a
different reason.
America shunned foreign entanglements after the Pentagon Papers’ release, which hawkish politicians belittled as our “Vietnam Syndrome.” I’m 100 percent anti-vax when it comes to the incubating Epstein Syndrome. Build a scoreboard to honor Epstein Syndrome superspreaders. As for the creeps in the files: Stack ’em like cordwood.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/columns/ivory-tower-iconoclast/our-elites-and-their-body-counts